In 2008, two small wooden boats, the Free Gaza and the Liberty, sailed to Gaza from Cyprus, carrying 44 international solidarity activists and medical supplies—breaking Israel’s criminal siege of the terriroty.
Today, many Jews are breaking with Zionism under the pressure of events in Gaza. This has also happened in the past. Indeed, anti-Zionism has been a crucial part of the Jewish radical tradition since the late 19th century.
It’s a historic anniversary that the US ruling class and its allies around the world wish we would forget. Fifty years ago, on 30 April 1975, US imperialism suffered the worst military defeat in its history.
Because of militant miners, the 1970s and 1980s in Britain are remembered not only as decades when the capitalist state attacked trade unions and working-class people. They are also memorialised as an era of defiant, tenacious and bitter class struggle, full of lessons.
What we have come to call the “neoliberal” era began under US President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, rather than his Republican successor Ronald Reagan.
If a socialist left is to be built with some hope of liberating the workers of the Middle East and winning freedom for the Palestinian people, then it is vital to come to terms with the legacy of Stalinist class-collaborationist politics and rebuild on a genuinely revolutionary basis.
